


Lucid Lullaby

by Erisden



Category: Legion (TV)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Manipulation, Memory Alteration, Mental Breakdown, Mind Control, Mind Manipulation, Mutants Are Weird, Nightmares, Past Mind Control, Psychic Abilities, Psychic Violence, Some Of These Things I Have No Idea What To Call, Telepathy, forced unconsciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-04-12 11:26:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19131079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erisden/pseuds/Erisden
Summary: A collection of short drabbles before/during Season 3, focusing on David's time at the commune.





	1. David & Commune Member

**Author's Note:**

> This was something quick I fired off and posted. Apologies for excited fingers. Speculation about David's methods in Season Three, before the season airs.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the middle of the night, David hears a distress signal coming from one of the commune members. He goes to investigate and deal with the problem.

David dreamt he was seventeen years old again and back in his old home. He crept across the upstairs hallway, striped socks whispering on the floor beneath him, his fingers gliding on the wall to ground him while his mind drifted and drifted, somewhere far away, like he was watching himself from above. From the other room, he could hear desperate cries. Someone pleasing to be let out. And screaming: the horrible screaming that scraped across his ears and bore holes in his eardrums and made him want to scream right back:  _ Shut up, shut up! I don’t care! _

_ Let me out! _

A ghost. He heard spirits. He’d heard them ever since he was eleven. People always said ghosts were more present during the night, but he heard them just as often during the daytime. Sometimes more. Most times, they said cruel things to him, meant to hurt his feelings. Other times, there were so many voices at once that he couldn’t make out what they were saying: only that they were saying words. Only that he was the only person who heard them. 

_ This is a bad place! _

But this was a single voice, somewhere in a room on the other side of the hallway. He followed the sound to his parents’ closed bedroom door. They wouldn’t mind if he opened it, so he did, peering inside.

A strange girl, several years older than him, sat on the bed, clutching a hard-backed children’s book in her arms. He didn’t have to look at it to know that it was The World’s Angriest Boy in the World. He could sense these things. Her eyes were red, her face tear-stained and her cheeks pink. Her nose ran, snot running all the way down past her lips. It looked like she hadn’t tried to wipe it away once.

“I don’t want you to come here!” she shouted. Her voice was so loud that it ricocheted around his mind and made his head hurt.

He didn’t come any closer. Even in dreams, he was unwilling to be killed. Smarter than that. “Why?”

“Evil! Evil! No good! Bad!”

“Who?”

She threw the book at him. He flinched. Her aim was off, and it hit the wall feet away and dropped to the ground facedown, pages bent beneath the cover. “You!  _ You!” _

He didn’t like this dream anymore. “Me?!”

“Let me out!” She sniffed and slid off the bed, staggering on her feet and lurching toward him.  _ “You! _ I can’t live like this!”

“You don’t live here!” He stumbled back, out into the hallway.

She followed. “It’s wrong! It’s wrong!  _ You!” _ Stopping by the book, she swiped it up again. This time, the front faced him. The Angry Boy glared at him. Above him, the girl glared, too. “I can’t live like this!”

“Like what?!”

“With you!” she shrieked, her voice cutting through the air like a hot knife. Another scream filled his ears, but it wasn’t coming from her.

David covered his ears. He would have covered his throat, too, if he’d had a third hand. “You don’t live here!”

“I hate this place!” And without a moment’s hesitation, she lunged forward, lashing out at him with the corner of the book, which had turned into a sharp blade. “I hope you  _ die!” _

With a gasp, David awakened in his bed, bolting upright in bed, his heart pounding in his chest. He could feel the touch of the blade at the side of his neck, but when he ran his finger below his jaw, he felt nothing there. The dream hadn’t killed him. Hadn’t been able to touch him.

But it hadn’t stopped.

Another scream erupted in his head, this time even louder than it had been in the dream. In an instant, David blocked it out, but the damage was done. The pain rang in his head. He reached up, pressing his palms hard to his ears and letting them pop the air back out.

_ Help, help! There’s no point. _

It was coming from somewhere in the commune.

Still groggy, David slid out of bed. He made his way over to the small coffee table near the foot of the bed and grabbed his beads, throwing them over his head. He ran his fingers through his hair and pressed the backs of his knuckles to his eyes, opening his mind just a crack - not enough to let the incessant voice in, but enough that he could tell which direction it was coming from.

Down a couple of halls, around a couple of corners. Past bedrooms and lounging areas, past the front door and up the stairs. Through a couple more halls. On the outside, the commune was small: a simple house shaped like a barn, old and run-down, with multi-coloured windows to fit the spirits of everyone inside. On the inside, it was much larger, and much more peaceful than the outside world. People of all different nations, different languages, living together without fighting. It was what they needed. It was what  _ he _ needed, too.

His friends weren’t going to love him anymore, so he’d found love elsewhere.

He didn’t feel like walking - he rarely did anymore - so he shut his eyes, flinging himself through the depths of his mind and teleporting himself into the room where he heard the screaming.

It was a relatively small room compared to the rest of the commune. Long couches lined the walls, their fabric worn. People draped over the cushions in every position imaginable. Everyone was asleep. Some wore clothes, and some didn’t, and David, by some still-present heedfulness, wiggled his fingers at his side and covered them with blankets. Even if the lighting was dim and the air coated with a hazy layer of smoke, he still knew when to allow them their dignity. They could do as they pleased. He only gave them what he thought they needed, when he was around.

David’s eyes glided across the room. He opened his mind again, letting the screams back in. It felt, in his mind, the way something bitter tasted on the tongue: harsh and lingering with terror and disbelief and something more that dropped straight through his throat and into the pit of his stomach.

_ Can’t take it! I have to warn them. It’s the right thing to do, it’s - _

She was near the center of the room, curled up on one end of the couch with her forearms over her face, her wide sleeves pooled around her elbow. Her thoughts were familiar. David knew who she was. She had only recently joined a week ago, after being stuck alone and in the rut of a failing life. She was no mutant, but a particularly strong-willed young woman who had defied death several times. By all means, she should have been dead. But she wasn’t. And maybe that was why her mind was so loud. David needed to seal it back up again, and better this time.

He took a step forward, boot tapping and beads rubbing against each other lightly.

The voice stopped for a moment. Then:  _ No! Oh no, everything is fine.  _ A flash of a reminder that David could read minds.  _ Go, go, please. _

He came closer. “Hey. You good?”

Her thoughts stopped abruptly. She raised her head, and David could see panic flash through her dark eyes before it was replaced again by a pleasant smile. “Me? Yeah.” Her mind still buzzed, duller now, forced quieter. “Yeah, man. Never better.”

David could tell she was lying. He shook his head, lips curling into a smile just as pleasant, and then a little wider. Calm. She needed to be calm. “I just thought I’d check in on you. You seemed… tense.”

“No,” she answered, too quick. “The life…” Her gaze darted around the room. “It’s different.”

“How?”

She looked back at him. “In a good way.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.” He teleported himself the last few feet to the table, placing his palms flat and leaning over his arms to peer at her.

In shock, she sat back in his seat.  _ No! _

“If you’re not happy here -”

“I’m happy!”  _ This isn’t good. Don’t come any closer. Don’t -  _ And again, that flash of her thoughts, reminding her that he could read her mind. Her eyes met his, impressively blank. “You make us happy.”

Lying through her teeth. 

_ Trying to trick us. Trying to confuse us. Keeping us like this! _

She wasn’t happy.

He let out a breath through his nose, standing up straight again, a smile still at his lips. She needed to be happy. She had to be. “Don’t worry,” he said, slowly sending his mind out to brush against hers. “There’s no need to be afraid anymore. I’m here to help you. To protect you from the people who want to hurt you, and all of us.”

And then, surprisingly, shockingly - she pushed back.

He felt her terror slam against his mind, so strong and so dreadfully cold that he was forced to yank it back. She leapt from her seat, grabbing the chair and throwing it at him.

He ducked and vanished, appearing several feet over. The chair hit the wall and clattered to the floor. The noise caused several people to stir from their sleep, but before they could register what was happening, David threw his arm out and sent an anesthetising wave over the room. They went limp again, falling back into unconsciousness. For extra security, he wrapped a blanket of nullification around the room, so that nobody from the outside could hear them. “Why did you think that was a smart idea?” he asked, smile still on his face. He needed to appear pleasant to her. After all, infiltrating her mind when he might still be able to win her over wasn’t the right thing to do. That was what his enemies would do. It wouldn’t be what  _ he  _ did.

“You’re tricking us!” She lifted her hands and pressed the heels of her palms into her temples. Her thoughts aligned with her words now. “You’re not trying to help us!” Her eyes found a random pile of sleeping people on a couch nearby. She rushed toward them, shaking one of their shoulders, but neither moved.

David watched her silently, his arms crossed behind his back. He could feel her panic, stifling in a room full of stagnant, dreaming minds and dead air. “Why do you think that?”

“Because I shouldn’t be here! Look at what you did to everyone!” She gestured out around the room.

David pretended to look around, as though he was noticing them for the first time. “I see our friends and family sleeping peacefully.” He looked at her. “As you should be.”

Breathing ragged, the woman swiped up a knife from between the cushions of the couch. She held her arm out, brandishing it at him. David could see that her fingers were wrapped around it so tightly that likes of white streaked across her knuckles, instead of the usual block. An unusual sight, but not a worrying one. “You  _ made _ them unconscious. You’re making it so that they can’t hear us, so that they - they won’t know anything that’s going on!”

“But I didn’t do the same to you.” David lifted his chin, watching the knife. “Why do you think that is?”

She shook her head, stepping over the sleepers, toward him. Her eyes never left him, not even to look down. “Doesn’t matter. You’re going to.”

Very slowly, he turned his palms toward her, to let her see that he had no weapons on him. He held his arms out at his sides, turning his head. If she chose to attack - which she would, he knew - then he would strike. But not before he tried to calm her. After all, that was what good people did. And he was a good person. “And how do you know that? Do I look like I want to hurt you? Put the knife down.”

“Put the knife down  _ what?” _

He frowned. “What does that mean?”

She stepped closer. “Do you even know my name?”

“I would never forget your name.” But he didn’t know it. He didn’t remember ever learning it.

She scoffed, her lips twitching downward. “You don’t know care about any of us!” And with that screech, she lunged, swiping at him with the knife.

But he was quicker: first, to freeze her in midair, the tip of the knife only centimetres away from his neck; then, to step around her and place one hand over her forehead. The other he curled around her shoulders so that he could lean in and murmur, just loud enough so that she could hear. “I’m sorry it had to be this way. Really, I am. If you had only been a little bit quieter, maybe I wouldn’t have heard you. But I did. I always hear you. That’s the difference between you and me. That’s why I’m here, and you’re… there.”

He curled his thoughts around her mind, letting his powers caress it gently. She was agitated, angry, and terrified. Terrified of  _ him. _ Oh, but he would much rather be lauded. So he shut his eyes, piling on the power, enveloping her consciousness and piercing through it in a sharp burst of psionic power and letting his influence fill it. She would worship him again. She would forget every bad thought she’d ever had of him, and everything that had happened here, and every doubt she’d had about him, because he was like a god, and he was here to help her, and he was the kindest man on this earth for doing it. 

And her terrified mind, hardened at first, very quickly melted and yielded. She was no psychic, no matter how strong her resolve was. Away went the thoughts of incompetence, away went the thoughts of his manipulation, away went the notion of killing him.

He wiggled his fingers behind her back, and the knife disappeared from her hand. Then he stepped back, allowing several feet between them, and let her free.

Disoriented, she blinked, glancing down at where she stood. When she spotted him, she frowned faintly, but there was no hint of her earlier emotions. Soon enough, a faint smile replaced the frown. “Did I sleepwalk again?”

David smiled reassuringly, reaching out to adjust the garland around her neck. “I was just coming in to check on everyone when I saw you walking.” Silently, he dissolved the blanket of anaesthesia in the minds of the sleepers. Some began to stir. Others remained asleep. They would never know what happened. “You looked like you were having a nightmare, so I woke you up.”

She suddenly looked as though she remembered something. “I was. I had the strangest dream… about walking through a house, and into a bedroom, and there was this… terrified girl. I don’t know why. She was babbling all sorts of… scary things.” Her gaze roamed for a moment, then focused back on him. “But I can’t remember now. You save me from it.”

“It’s what I do.” He stepped back, content. “Get some rest. And maybe lie down this time.” He nodded to the fallen chair near the door. “Looks like you knocked that over on your way up.”

She nodded, as happy as everyone else in this commune, and turned away.

David had done his job. As a last reminder, so that he would know if it happened again, he pinned the edges of his mind to every part of commune and feeling for the faint, satisfied energy of his followers.

Proud and unshaken, he walked the twists and turns of the halls back to his room. He shut the door quietly behind him, took off his beads, and crawled back into bed.


	2. David & Cary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post-3x03. David's failed attempt to stop the monster from possessing him brings him to a meltdown. Cary keeps him company for a little while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wasn't actually planning on adding chapters to this, but, uh... it happens.

Today, David Haller failed.

Today, he had finally gotten a taste of what true failure felt like. Nothing that had happened in his life could ever compare to how it felt when he saw his mother - his beautiful mother - collapse at the sight of him; how it felt when his father had knocked him right out of the timeline; how it felt when he had been unable to return because Switch had to  _ sleep. _

And now, while Switch dozed off her time travel fatigue, David had resigned himself to the home inside his cave to let out the grief in his body. This time, unlike the other times, the sadness overwhelmed him until he couldn’t bare to look at anyone before. A little shake of his head and a stretch of his powers across the entire building, and he had secured himself time: a few hours of respite to let it all out while everyone else completely forgot that he was here at all.

But somehow, he had missed a spot.

“… David?”

David lowered the heel of his palm from his eyes and looked up. Through the tears, he saw Cary standing at the door, the makings of a cylindrical wire frame clutched nervously in his hands.

He suddenly felt exposed and vulnerable. “What?”

“I-I wanted to ask what range you needed this to be able to reach for this. Time-wise.” Cary looked over him worriedly. “But if you’re busy, I can come back another time.” He looked away and took a step back. “I didn’t mean to intrude -”

“No.” Seized with the sudden urge to make Cary stay, David stood. He sniffed, rubbing the moisture from his cheeks in a lousy attempt to hide the fact that he has been crying. Leaders didn’t break down. “Stay.” For now, he didn’t try to twist Cary into doing it. He didn’t need to.

Cary paused for a moment. He seemed to notice for the first time what shape David was in, and his eyes widened in surprise. Hurriedly, he moved to set the wires down on the nearby table, next to the pitcher of black tea. “Are you okay?”

No one had asked David that in what felt like years. He felt the tears pricking dangerously at his eyes again, and the sob pressing against the sides of his throat. Leaders never broke down? Bullshit. “No.” That was, for once, the truth. “Everything is really hard.”

Again, Cary seemed not to know what to do. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Without a second thought, David nodded. He stepped backwards until he reached the couch and sat at one side of it, gesturing for Cary to come sit with him. Cary did, and almost immediately, David began talking again. “Switch and I went to the past, to save the world. We tried. I saw what I needed to. I… I was trying to find myself, as a baby. To stop Amahl Farouk from possessing me, so that…” He swallowed. “But…” And trailed off.

Beside him, Cary shifted, his hands folded in his lap. He said nothing. It reminded David of the way his therapists used to listen to him speak. Doctor Poole: when he would sit in his chair cross-legged, his clipboard balanced on his thigh, his glasses settled a little farther down on his nose than they should be. It made him look like an old, wise guru, ready to absorb all the bad feelings so that David could go home without the weight of the world on his shoulders.

The tears hurt his eyes. He squeezed them shut. “But it didn’t work. Mommy couldn’t see me. And when she did, it was -” The memory flashed in his mind’s eye: of Gabrielle staring at him in genuine terror, as though he was the malevolent entity in the room and not the Shadow King; of Gabrielle lying on the floor; of his father sending a psychic blast at him so powerful that it had knocked him straight out of the timeline.

Maybe she was dead.

David let out a sudden, strangled sob he hadn’t realised he had held in. She couldn’t be. “I don’t know! I don’t know if she’s okay! I have to go back.” He opened his eyes. Now the tears ran freely. “I  _ have _ to go back. When she wakes up, I’ll go back. I can fix this. I can still fix this.”

“Yes, you… of course you can, David. You can fix this.” Cary reached out and placed a hand on David’s forearm. His palm sat like a comforting weight. Like he had suddenly come into some responsibility to calm David down. To help him. “When you came to Summerland, I saw something in you. Potential, just like Melanie did. I saw it when you broke the MRI machine.” He chuckled. “We all saw. And when you went to rescue your sister from… from Division Three, instead of listening to us - you have resolve, David. And you have the powers. I know you can fix whatever you put your mind to, if you want.”

David looked at Cary. He searched his eyes and found no lies. He picked his thoughts and found beliefs the likes of which seared into his own mind, they were so strong. But they were familiar, too, tinged with the thoughts David had implanted into his mind several days ago. Clearly, Cary knew that he was capable, that he could handle this.

But Syd was still out there, in cahoots with Division Three and the devil himself, waiting for the day when she could finally take David down. She was no longer in love with him. She’d said so herself.

And if she wasn’t, then - 

Starting over was the only option.

And it hadn’t worked.

Even now, David didn’t feel very much like he could right now.

His resolve cracked a little more. “Syd hates me,” he whispered, slumping against the back of the couch and resting his head on a cushion that suddenly appeared beneath it. “She talked to me. She doesn’t love me anymore. I couldn’t fix that.” And the whole world stood grey and lifeless and at the edge of collapse because of it. Nothing could be salvaged now. All that was left to do was to start over, no matter what that took. “I thought if I talked to her, I could tell her - I could show her what it was like. What we could still be. What… and she said - instead, she said I - I would still be the same person, even if I went back and undid things, and I… so why not - why not just get rid of Farouk. Get rid of everything he did. And I couldn’t, because Mommy fell and then there was Dad and he - and then  _ Switch - _ ”

It was all a mess, as much as he was now, emotional bouncing off the walls of his mind and riding through his veins and sleeping into his restless muscles. In an instant, he was at the other side of the room, pacing along the wall, the bottoms of his palms at his temples. Though he had his eyes squeezed shut, he could hear Cary standing from his spot on the couch.

“You don’t have to worry about a thing,” Cary said desperately, and when David opened his eyes, he saw the man approaching him slowly, his arms outstretched, hands palms up. “If there’s anyone capable of handling things, it’s you.”

David shook his head quickly. “But what if I  _ can’t?  _ What if Syd shoots me again and Switch can’t save me? What if I keep messing up this thing with my parents? What if I can’t fix this?”

“Just because you failed once doesn’t mean you’ll fail again the second time, or the third time. You said it yourself - you’re going to save the world. You’re going to go back and fix things, however that plays out.” Cary smiled faintly, if not reassuringly. “I believe that.”

David wiped his eyes with a hand, taking one of Cary’s hands in the other. He sniffed. “I know. I - but why? Why did this have to happen? Why did…” He thought of the way his mother had looked at his little baby self: how much adoration and fondness there was. How much  _ love _ there was. He deserved that, and he’d never had it, and he ached even more. He  _ wanted _ it.

Despair welled in his chest and up into his throat, and tears threatened at his eyes again. Without a word, he teleported them both to the couch, where he burrow himself against Cary. He needed that touch. He needed something to keep him grounded, to soak up the bad feelings inside of him. Maybe Cary wasn’t a therapist, but he was still here, and he listened, and that was what mattered.

 “Why did th-they give… have to give me away?” he sobbed, lying right against Cary’s side. “What was - what was wrong with me?”

Tentatively, Cary’s arm slipped around his shoulders. “Nothing is… nothing is wrong with you.”

“But they - they gave me away. Something -  _ something _ was wrong with me. They didn’t want me. They didn’t want to love - to  _ love  _ me anymore. Mama loved me, she - she could have loved me my whole life if… but she didn’t, and they - they gave me away, and the monster, and Syd doesn’t love me, and my life - my  _ life _ -” Another strangled sob cut him off, and he turned his head and curled into Cary’s side.

Cary said nothing in response, but David didn’t care. He continued to cry. All the anguish and the torment and the guilt over what he had done, what he had to go through, the monster that had crawled inside his head and twisted him up and sucked all the love from his bones until the very marrow sat dry and hard inside his body, who had ruined his entire life, who had forced everyone to turn on him and cast him away from the only other thing he knew. And Syd: not in love with him, willing to shoot him in the back without a word, ready to  _ kill _ him when it came to it. He couldn’t stand it. He didn’t want to stand it.

“Do you think,” he murmured, “anyone could ever love me?”

“Of course,” Cary answered softly.

“What if you’re wrong?”

“Well… while that possibility is not something to rule out, I know firsthand what you’re doing here. The way nobody else does.” Cary patted him on the shoulder. “I see the way everyone looks at you. The people here love you. You’re going to save the world.”

David wiped at his eyes. “Do you think I deserve love? That I’m a good person?”

Silence. Then, so softly that David almost couldn’t hear: “I think you’re doing what you need to do. You just want to save the world. What’s wrong with that?”

David looked at the wall. His eyes hurt. He shut them. He and Cary were the only ones in this room right now, and that meant they were the only ones who mattered. “You’re right,” he sniffed. “I… I deserve love. My mother would have loved me, and my father. They would have… and then… all I have to do is go back and fix it, right? It’s - it’s not like plates and bowls. You… you fix things.”

“That’s the spirit. Find a way and keep trying.” Cary hummed and nudged himself against David.

David smiled widely and squeezed his eyes shut. He pressed his cheek against Cary’s shoulder and pulled his knees up, focusing on his breathing. Eventually, it grew steady. Sniffing, he twisted to face Cary and curled an arm around his chest, pressing against him in a gentle hug. “Thank you. You’re right. I can do this.” He paused for a moment, then pressed his lips together and pulled away again. “I feel better now.”

Cary squeezed David’s arm, smiling. “Good.”

Before Cary could move, David nestled himself into his side more comfortably. He reached up to place his hand against the side of Cary’s head and shut his eyes, and Cary tensed - but that was all he did, before David stole all of the memories of what had just transpired from his mind and wiped them out of existence. “Thank you,” he whispered.

And then, in a heartbeat, David teleported him back to the doorway, where he stood glassy eyed and non-responsive. David reached a hand out and snapped, and Cary suddenly returned, glancing around in confusion. He adjusted his jacket and returning to the table to retrieve his contraption and turning it over in his hands. “That’s funny - how did that get over there? Hmm.” He looked toward David. “I-I wanted to ask what range you needed this to be able to reach for this. Time-wise.”

David got up and made his way to Cary’s side, his hands behind his back. He tilted his head and looked down at the metallic, wired thing, wiping his cheeks with a hand. “As far back as you can go. And… for good measure, go as far forward as you can, too. It just needs to be stronger.”

Cary stared at him for a long moment. David saw a blankness in his eyes, as though his brain were trying to reconcile what David had just done to what he thought now. But that was fine. To make Cary keep the memory of the burden would have done more harm than good for the both of them.

Then Cary blinked, and the blankness vanished, replaced with warmth, and David knew that it had worked. “It will be.”


End file.
